Scouting Report: Prince Fielder

Scouting Report: Prince Fielder

            At this point I’ve mostly looked at players having a good year, and not always the big named players.  Chris Davis, Hunter Pence, Jean Segura and Domonic Brown are all having a good season or better from when I did my report of them.  But lets take a look at someone that is a big name in the sport and, more importantly, is struggling this year even if you don’t see it.  Today let’s take a look at the big time slugger Prince Fielder and see what the stats can tell us about him.

            Prince Fielder is easily one of the best hitters in baseball and even if he’s having a bad season this year.  There have been signs that something like this could happen; last year we saw his BA rise while his SLG and HR numbers go down slightly from what we expect from Prince.  This year he’s hitting a dismal .260/.348/.436, now granted the OBP is still good which is a good sign that his could be just a bump in the road but his SLG being almost 100 points lower than his career is a disturbing thing.  Well let’s stop the talking and let the stats say what’s going on so here we go.

            I mentioned that the OBP of Fielder is actually good, his estimated OBP is sitting at .088, which is good, but not great, he’s not walking as much as he normally does.  It’s not great but it’s also not bad; his BB% is sitting at 11% and his career BB% is 13% so not a massive dip but it is a drop.  While I don’t think this is a major issue it is something to watch since it has been slowly dropping the last 2 years.  On the other end his K% is sitting nicely at 17.5%; which matches his career numbers.  This is actually a good thing to see since, while still higher than his last few years, it’s in line with his career and I don’t see it rising.  Last but not least his K/BB% is currently at 1.5 meaning he’s getting about 2 K’s for every BB and that’s a good pace.

            Lets look at his BA and Contact% next since that’s where we’re seeing the biggest dip from previous season to his year.  Fielder is batting .260 right now which is 20 points lower than his career line, he’s only batted this low 1 other time back in 2010.  1 good place to at least get our start is the BABIP; Fielder’s career BABIP is .301.  As a reminder BABIP stands for Batting Average on Balls In Play and works much like a “luck factor”.  As of right now Fielder’s current BABIP is .288, 20 points lower than his career line.  It’s his lowest since 2007 but I’m not to worried about this after all the idea of BABIP is to kind of gauge things that he doesn’t have a tremendous amount of control over.  His LD%, GB% and FB% are all in line with his career normal’s, in fact his LD% is up by 2 points which is interesting when we start looking at the power.  Fielder is swinging outside the zone more than he normally does at 30% and makes contact with those pitches 65% of the time its not great and may be one cause of his troubles but there’s not trend showing this is the new Fielder so I’m not to worried, his contact% in the zone is currently 83% and a swing% of 68%.  Again good but you would rather see him swing more in the zone than outside the zone.  Prince is swinging overall more than normal but again there’s no evidence of a trend developing.

            Most of Prince Fielder’s value on the field, and fantasy for that matter, is in his power and that’s down this year so lets see what we can find.  The first thing that we can see is the HR/FB rate is not just down but way down; normally Fielder gets a HR every 5.2 FB’s in his career that’s roughly 19% of his total AB’s.  This year he’s hitting 1 every 8 FB’s, which is roughly 12%, this is well below average for him and the one this that can at least shed light is the LD% I mentioned earlier.  His high LD% can actually mean he’s not getting enough lift on the ball and the ball is staying straight.  This is just my opinion on that one but it is something to note.  Fielders ISO is way down from career totals; currently sitting at .179 and his career is .244.  This could support my lift theory a bit; Fielder is not that fast so the fact he’s not getting the ball over the fence this year means his LD’s are actually dropping in and he isn’t getting the XB hits he normally could have gotten if he was lifting the ball more.  The lack of speed would make him limited to singles and that would lower his ISO while keeping the SLG looking like its decent.  The only thing I can say for the lack of power can be attributed to the more swinging and swinging out of the zone combined with not getting the ball up more; I don’t think these are going to be normal for Fielder moving on with his career but it is something to keep in mind.

            So we see Fielders hitting and power and today we look at his defense.  As I learn more stats and learn to translate them better I like to add in more to the scouting reports so today we look at defense for the first time.  UZR or Ultimate Zone Range helps rate a players fielding ability and how many balls he gets in the “zone range” he gets and translate that into how many runs that its cost the team.  Prince Fielder has a UZR of -4.3 and his UZR 150 is -5 (150 defensive games), to give you a scale 0.0 would obviously mean he’s not giving up runs for his team and a + would be adding runs to his team while – costs the team runs.  So Fielder is actually costing his team 4 runs just with his defense; which actually can make his lack of offense more hurtful.  His fielding% is currently at .994, which is good, but considering that we can see his UZR is hurt the team its kind of a lie.  Lastly we can look at the +/- stat, which shows how many runs he saves through fielding, sounds like UZR but it doesn’t take into account range just fielding skill.  Fielder has a +/- of -10 so he gives up 10 runs for his team with his fielding skills, hence we can see the FP being somewhat a lie.

            Fielder is having one bad season the more you look at him; his overall value to the team is actually hurting the team at his point.  His WAR is sitting at 1.1 and for reference that puts him as a role player or bench player value.  I don’t think this is Fielder, not at all, and from what we’ve seen this just seems like a bad year.  But the thing we have to remember is that this isn’t the first year we’ve seen the power take a dive.  Take away the field factors and Prince has been the HR threat he was in Milwaukee.  Only time can tell if this is going to be a consistent problem for Prince Fielder or this year is just a fluke.